I purchased a set of parts for my Arduino Uno, including a breadboard. I tried connecting the micro controller to the breadboard, but nothing seemed to happen when I decided to test it out with an LED. What could be the problem? Pictures of how I connected it and of the breadboard itself are provided below. I am an almost complete novice in electronics, so could someone please tell me what's wrong?

It is hard to see how things are wired up from the photograph but it looks wrong.

On a bread board the outer lines run horizontally and the inner ones run vertically. So on that photograph it looks like you have shorted ground to an output pin. The white wire is not connected to anything. The yellow wire is connected to a resistor to ground and the LED is not connected to anything.

Connect a wire from the output pin 13 to the resistor, from there to the LED and the other end of the LED to ground. Make sure you have the LED round the right way and you have enabled pin 13 as an output in the setup() part of your sketch.

I purchased a set of parts for my Arduino Uno, including a breadboard. I tried connecting the micro controller to the breadboard, but nothing seemed to happen when I decided to test it out with an LED. What could be the problem? Pictures of how I connected it and of the breadboard itself are provided below. I am an almost complete novice in electronics, so could someone please tell me what's wrong?

One thing I have found with some el-cheapo breadboards is that the horizontal power lines are NOT connected to each other. Use a multimeter to check this. Sometimes, just the rows of 5 have connections within themselves but not with the other adjacent rows. Also are you using pin 13 to drive the LED? I believe that pin already has a series resistor attached! LED's won't turn on below a certain voltage, I think. Double check that you plug in the wires to the same row as your LED pins (this may seem trivial but I've blown up a couple of ICs not checking this...), and that your LED is not plugged in backwards (remember, the long lead is positive. If you look inside, you'll see a couple of metal axe-like things. One's big and one's small. The big one is negative. Big axe = negative = bad).

One thing I have found with some el-cheapo breadboards is that the horizontal power lines are NOT connected to each other.

This is not because they are el-cheapo. This is done intentionally to allow for more flexibility in power distribution. If they did not do this, it would be a real pain if you needed to distribute 2 or even 3 voltages on the one breadboard. My $259 3M ACE breadboard is set up this way, and I appreciate it very much. It can hardly be called el-cheapo.

They are usually connected in groups of 3 or 4 five tie-point segments. 3-4-3 on a board like that one, so your resistor is not connected to ground. Run a small jumper from the end of the 3rd segment to the beginning of the 4th segment on the ground side. This should get ground to the LED resistor. If is still does not work, try turning the LED around.